By According to developer Jeff Johnson, the Photos app on iPhone is reportedly transmitting users’ photo data to Apple without their explicit consent. This functionality, referred to as “Enhanced Visual Search,” facilitates the identification of landmarks but relies on sharing data with Apple’s servers.
Many users of the iPhone 15 Pro and other iOS devices have discovered that this setting is enabled by default in their Photos app configurations. Accessible via iOS Settings or the Photos app settings on Mac, this feature allows users to recognize landmarks in their images and locate photos by searching with landmark names.
Enhanced Visual Search: A Shift in Data Handling Compared to Visual Look Up
- The “Enhanced Visual Search” feature builds on the Visual Look Up functionality first introduced in iOS 15 but involves a notable change in data processing.
- Unlike Visual Look Up, which processes data entirely on the device, Enhanced Visual Search transmits encrypted “vector embeddings”—numerical representations of image features—to Apple’s servers for landmark identification.
- According to Apple’s machine learning research blog, the process begins with on-device analysis to identify “regions of interest” that may contain landmarks.
- These identified regions are transformed into vector embeddings, encrypted, and sent to Apple’s global landmark database for comparison and matching.
Although Apple has implemented privacy safeguards, such as data encryption and compressed image formatting, the default activation of this data-sharing feature has raised privacy concerns. This approach differs from Apple’s handling of other data collection functionalities, like Siri interactions and analytics, which usually require explicit user consent.
Apple has yet to address these privacy concerns or respond to requests for comment. Users who wish to disable the feature can do so manually by accessing the Photos settings in the iOS Settings app or the Photos app settings menu on Mac.
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